Devonport (2.00 pm)

[photograph: Jack Ross (2006)]

A Sunday Walk

Heteroglossia is as close a conceptualization as is possible of that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide …

– Michael Holquist

MTChalk butterfly
VICTORIAetched in the pavement
faded to two wings
an eye open on each

bridge binding up the harbour
sails becalmed
stick-figure
mother
halfway up the slope

… as such, it is that which a systematic linguistics must always suppress.

– The Dialogic Imagination: 4 Essays by M. M. Bakhtin

NORTH· How did you do that?
HEAD· I’ll scrub them when I get home
· Whatever
· Have you had an inspiration?
· Uh
· Get up and stop being stupid
– to a fallen child –

[First published in Poetry NZ 28 (2004): 91].

Birkenhead (4.00 pm)

[photograph: Jack Ross (2006)]

Birkenhead

Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount?

– Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

If you can’t park in Birkenhead
where can you park?
Slip Inn

Play the Big Game
Dollars & Dealers
money talks

but bullshit walks
exchange the orange baby
for the panda bear

Since the All Blacks lost
’s such a hassle
two mouths crooked so

mother & daughter
Full prog
& bikini underarm

Black on white
& white on brown

Breaking the norm

[First published in Spin 49 (2005): 60-62].

Rangitoto (5.00 pm)

[photograph: Jack Ross (2006)]

Refrigerium

the damned have holidays – excursions … to this country
– C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

Acc. to St. ThomasIt came to me
Aquinaslike a light
the smallest painin the centre of my vision

blanking outin Purgatory
allis greater than
but the peripheriesthe greatest on earth


Screamingwalking up Rangitoto
I buried my facestopping
in my teacher’s robeswinded

halfway upThe morning! The morning!
to read out versesI am caught by the morning
to the scoria& I am a ghost


it being relieveddown by the wharf
howeverwe waited
by the certitudefor the ferryman

to take usof salvation
to the asphodelsestablishing Holy Souls
the farther shores ofin deepest



[Portions of this text were sampled from C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce: A Dream (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945) 60-61; 117; & the entry on “Purgatory” from The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross (London: Oxford University Press, 1957) 1126].